The problem with using AI to write is that the writing sounds like AI.
Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI who left Tesla in 2022 and joined Anthropic in May, has a solution.
He recommends using a style guide created in the late 1970s by European airlines so their mechanics could follow maintenance instructions without making errors. The grammar and vocabluary was simplified for mechanics that spoke dozens of languages.
The guide is called ASD-STE100. The industry published it in 1986. The corpus has about 900 approved words. Each word has one meaning. Sentences are capped at 20 words. It uses active voice and one instruction per sentence.
Karpathy tweeted this week that the trick is to tell Claude or ChatGPT to write in the style of ASD-STE100. He said the models already know the spec, but the full version is so strict that he sometimes asks for “80 percent of the way to ASD-STE100.”
It’s ironic of course that the solution to bad AI writing is more AI writing.
And the way to write effectively is to limit yourself to so few words. (English has by some counts as many as 470,000 words. An average person uses about 35,000.)
But the models were trained on the average of everything written online, and the average of anything is usually bad. Based on training data, the models learned that good writing includes qualifiers, transitions, observations stacked on observations.
As more and more people have turned to AI to write (an estimated 40% of LinkedIn is written with AI) that style of writing has become a signal of a lack of effort and authenticity; an indication the writer didn’t care very much.
So Karpathy’s fix is to strip it down to the bare essence.
